(Joint media availability with New York City Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani)

Giuliani: Mr. Secretary,
thank you very very much for coming. I know I express the
view of all of us in New York City in thanking you for your
remarkable leadership during this very very difficult
period. I think everyone in New York is enormously
impressed with the leadership you're providing, the ways
that you're communicating with us and explaining to us
what's happening, and of course we're all praying for our
men and women in the military who are supporting us and
defending us. You have our support and you have our
prayers.

Thank you for coming.

Rumsfeld:
Thank you, sir.

Well, Mr. Mayor, and all of those
who have been helping you and supporting you in the
leadership you have provided to this city and indeed the
country, we thank you. I guess the site there says it all.
The Pentagon is no longer smoking, and yet here we are, so
many weeks later, and the World Trade Center is still
burning, still smoking.

I guess the one word that
comes to mind is -- is really "duty." You've done yours, the
people of New York have done theirs, and the men and women
in uniform are still doing theirs. The task they have is a
very complicated one. It's different than any that's ever
been undertaken. There is no road map, and so much of it
can't be seen as to what's taking place. But the president
is determined to root out the terrorists wherever they are,
to find them, to bring them to justice or bring justice to
them. And his determination and his will and his steadiness
of purpose are clear, I think, not just to the people of
this country but clear to the people of the world.

And we've benefited from the wonderful cooperation from so
many other countries, just as you've benefited here from
people from all across the United States helping out, and we
did at the Pentagon, as well. They came from far and
wide.

We have a task before us that is -- it's
going well. We're making progress. But it's far from
finished. And as the president said, we're going to stick
at it till it's done.

Thank you.

Giuliani: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

Rumsfeld: We'd be happy to respond to some questions.

Q: Mr. Secretary, if I may.

Rumsfeld: Yes.

Q: Has there been any success overnight in hunting down any
of the leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda? And have these
other tribes taken the airfield in Kandahar, or what type of
progress? Are the al Qaeda and Taliban retreating into the
hills?

Rumsfeld: There are Taliban doing all of
those things, as well as still fighting, and as are the al
Qaeda. There's still fighting taking place up in Kunduz in
the north. I suspect it's mostly al Qaeda, as opposed to
Taliban. There's fighting taking place in the south.

The people of the major cities have been so welcoming to the
forces that have been liberating them and so grateful that
the Taliban are fleeing and the al Qaeda are fleeing, that
the sights of music and welcome are certainly gratifying.
It says something about how repressive and how vicious the
Taliban rule and the al Qaeda rule have been.

Q:
Was there any success in hunting down any of the leaders
overnight?

Rumsfeld: It is a process that goes
on. Some have been killed. Others are hiding. And there
are no particular reports of senior leadership having been
located.

Q: Mr. Secretary, you've mentioned this
site many times, including once when you were defending the
speed of the military campaign, saying that these ruins were
still smoking.

Rumsfeld: They still are today.

Q: I'm wondering what your feelings are today, now that
this is at a lightning pace, it seems, in Afghanistan, and
if you feel like telling us, "I told you so?"

Rumsfeld: No, I don't. We still have a ways to go, and I
can understand when things are happening that aren't visible
and aren't something that we can remark on, I can understand
the impatience. But the pressure has been on from the
beginning. The pressure is still on today, and the pressure
is going to have to stay on, not just in Afghanistan but
elsewhere, because the terrorist networks are spread across
the globe. And it is, needless to say, gratifying to see
the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting
their country back.

On the other hand, our task is
to find the al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership, and we
still have that ahead of us. So we have to be purposeful
about that and recognize that that's going to continue to be
a difficult task. It is -- finding handfuls of people is
indeed like finding needles in a haystack, and it's a
complicated process. But because of all the pressure that
has been put on across the globe -- the drying up of bank
accounts, the numbers of arrests that have been made, the
interrogations that have been held, the intelligence that
has been gathered -- I think that we have -- every day we
have a better chance of achieving our goals.

Q:
Mr. Secretary, could you talk about how quickly New York
will be getting the $20 billion in federal aid? And as you
stand here now, how important do you think it is to get it
and get it soon?

Rumsfeld: Well, I'm not in the
Congress, but there's no question but that the Congress has
been interested, responsive, and I think the mayor would be
a better one to ask -- answer that question. I know the
president has been determined.

Giuliani: We have
not had -- we haven't had any difficulty in getting the aid
that we need. The White House has been very helpful.
Congress has been very helpful. So I don't anticipate that
there's going to be any major difficulty in getting the
reimbursement that we need to pay for this project.

Q: [Inaudible.]

Giuliani: I don't know what the
correct amount is. It isn't a matter of 20 billion
[dollars] or 15 [billion dollars] or 25 billion [dollars].
It's the amount of money that it costs to actually do the
cleanup. That's the amount that we need. So I have no
reason to believe that we're not going to get that as we
need it -- now, before the end of the year, and then we're
going to need it well into next year. So it's -- I don't
quite understand why someone would limit it to the end of
this year. The city is going to need that help over the
course of the next 12 to 18 months.

Q: Mr.
Secretary, there's fighting going on in Kandahar right now,
and is that a focus of your military activity --

Rumsfeld: Kandahar, of course, is the stronghold of the
Taliban. Indeed, it's been something that almost
approximates their capital, as opposed to Kabul. And there
is fighting taking place in and around Kandahar. It is -- I
hope and expect that there will be a lot of activity by the
tribes in the South who have not been supportive of the
Taliban, and that they'll be encouraged to assert themselves
and to take over.

Q: Is the airport there in the
hands of -- still in the hands of the Taliban, or is that --
(off mike)?

Rumsfeld: I have not checked in the
last two hours.

Q: Mr. Secretary, have you heard
anything from your Special Operations forces that are in the
South? Are they have having any luck with the Pashtun
tribes?

And could you tell us the significance of
the fact that it seems to be al Qaeda fighters now, instead
of Taliban? Is the Taliban in its last gasp?

Rumsfeld: The forces in the South have had a role in doing
a series of assessments and interdicting some activity in
that part of the country.

The Taliban are Afghans.
The al Qaeda have -- are for the most part Arabs. And the
al Qaeda has pretty much taken over control, as far as I can
tell, in some portions of the country. They have been
particularly active fighters, and they have been organizers
of the Taliban.

The Taliban is melting into the --
some pieces of it are melting into the countryside, part of
it because they may have decided to toss in the towel. In
other cases, they may simply be waiting to counterattack at
some later time. And I think one ought not to assume that
anything is necessarily permanent at this point. Until that
country stabilizes, things could go -- could move back and
forth, and we have to be aware of that.

Q: Mr.
Secretary, could you explain what you mean by interdiction
by the Special Operation forces? And have you been able to
insert more Special Operation teams into the South?

Rumsfeld: We have been inserting some teams in the South,
and when I mean interdicting, I mean interdicting. I mean
they have been interdicting the main roads that connect the
North from the South, to see what's going on, and to stop
people that they think ought to be stopped.

Q:
Are they actually involved in fighting --

Rumsfeld: I haven't checked in the last two hours.

Staff: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Q: The
Taliban are retreating [inaudible] borders. How do you know
that the al Qaeda aren't leaving into other countries,
including bin Laden?

Rumsfeld: The border is
porous. There are some portions of it where the countries
are more -- are able to be more vigilant than others, but
there's no question but that particularly in the Pakistani
border and the Iranian border, people can move in and out,
and have for centuries.

Q: How do you know that
rather than killing them, that you're not just drawing them
out of Afghanistan into the neighboring countries?

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